Home

Plan and Goals of the Course

In General

I last offered this course in 2007. I have fixed some broken links, and made some minor edits, as of May 2014. H.H.

Greek 701 is a course for those who are beginning their graduate studies. Its aim is to improve students’ ability to read and understand Attic Greek.

Reading

We read selections from Greek prose authors of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E., ranging from Hekataios to Demosthenes. Assignments are fairly brief (about five Oxford pages a week) so that we can translate and analyze each selection closely as we follow the development of Attic prose style. In particular, the course seeks to examine the nature and development of periodic sentence structure in Attic Greek. Most of the selections assigned are available, via the Perseus web site, by clicking on the course syllabus.

We spend the first several weeks on Lysias, in order to review Attic morphology and syntax and to establish a “baseline” for discussions of loose and periodic sentence structure and of prose style in general.

Writing

The weekly written assignments consist at first of English sentences to be rendered into Greek in order to review certain basic points of syntax such as conditional sentences, indirect statement, and correlatives. There are also verb synopses.

Later in the course the students are asked to compose short paragraphs of connected prose in order to enhance their understanding of the varied and elegant ways in which writers of Attic prose structured their thoughts.

Finally the students, while continuing to compose Greek, compare the styles of various authors, first in informal “sketches” and later in a formal term paper.

Course Materials On Line

Most of the materials which students use in Greek 701–Greek texts, introductory sketches of various authors, translated excerpts from ancient critics, bibliography, written assignments, an essay by the instructor on loose style and periodic style, and a “style scoresheet” highlighting notable points of style–are available on line. Go to the syllabus and click in the appropriate place.

Woodhouse’s English-Greek dictionary is available online. Click here to connect.

Graphics and Greek

For technical reasons it was not practical to embed Greek font in on-line documents distributed in “text” form. So I have had recourse to three other ways of presenting Greek:

For most authors read in Greek 701, you can click on the assignment in the syllabus and go directly to the Greek text as provided by the Perseus Project. This also gives you access to superb morphological and lexical tools, thanks to Perseus.

In other materials for the course, I provide links to scanned images of Greek text or even present the entire document as an image. In doing so I have tried to strike a balance between file size and image quality.

For brief Greek quotations embedded within English text, I have used a simple and self-explanatory system of transliteration (not TLG beta code, with which most students in the course are not familiar).

Classics at CUNY

For information on the Ph.D. Program in Classics at the City University Graduate Center, click here.